Winter-Blooming Annuals

Caring for perennials - Though perennial borders are not as popular now as they used to be, members of this clan are undoubtedly wonderful bets in most Western gardens. Their ability to yield blooms for so many continuous weeks endears them to most gardeners.

However, after the plants have been in the same spot for three years or longer, they'll begin to get a little tired as far as bloom production is concerned. This is your cue to step in and lift and divide the plants, getting rid of the woody centers and saving instead the vigorous, young outside shoots.

This advice applies particularly to such favorites as Michaelmas daisies, rudbeckias, salvias, thalictrum, violets, Shasta daisies, coreopsis, gaillardias, penstemons, scabiosa, geum, bleeding-hearts and coral-bells.

There's a lazy way to divide overgrown clumps of perennials, too. If you don't want to bother with lifting and dividing the clumps, cut out the center of the clumps with a sharp spade, without disturbing the rest of the plants. While this doesn't work on all perennials, Michaelmas daisies, perennial phlox, Shasta daisies and Japanese wind flowers or anemones seem to benefit when handled in this rough manner.

Feeding plants - In cold soils at this time of the year animal manures cannot supply nitrogen readily to plants because the bacterial action, which is required to change organic nitrogen into a form available to plants, must have warmth.

For this reason, do not hesitate to use a commercial fertilizer containing nitrogen. Liquid fish fertilizers or fertilizer for zoysia, for example, are particularly useful for fattening up winter-blooming annuals.

Taking cuttings of geranium and heliotrope - This is a good time to take cuttings of geraniums and that fragrant old-fashioned favorite, heliotrope. Place the cuttings in a mixture of half coarse sand and half sphagnum moss. The acid content in the sphagnum encourages more cuttings to strike root successfully.

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Tags: cold soils